DANCE/FIELD

A flash-mob of Busby Berkeley-inspired synchronized swimmers and a Brooklyn running club dance to a live disco score on treadmills.

DANCE/FIELD* is a live, large-scale, multimedia dance and performance piece performed only once as part of the curated series DanceRoulette in Brooklyn in February 2014. At the heart of the piece is a large-scale flash-mob dance which bursts in to the actual performance space from the streets of Downtown Brooklyn. Co-choreographed by Andrew Schneider and Vanessa Walters (Fischerspooner), the dance is an explosion of energy and athleticism. The choreography co-opts the movements of synchronized swimming, speed skating, and running, into a simple but powerful set of movements which accumulate as the performers enter the space one by one over the course of a single 8 minute song. The dance uses every level of the Roulette performance space, filling the balcony, the aisles, as well as the stage. A live-feed camera tracks the runners through Downtown Brooklyn and into the space to join the performers already there. Hyper-precise LED concert lighting, lasers, and confetti canons pile-on the exuberance and joy of the dancing until the dance itself can’t take any more. The dance eventually cracks and reveals intercuts of an intimate conversation between two fighting lovers over the phone. The woman is live in the space on her cell phone. Computer controlled LED lighting systems intercut the action of the dance with the action of the cell-phone breakup (much like the instantaneousness of changing the channel on a television). The two performances begin to occupy the same space at the same time. The intercutting becomes so rapid as if these two disparate performances are different frames of a film reel becoming cut frame by frame together. They become interleaved. They become lenticular. We experience the unhinged, over-the-top exuberance of the dance at the same time as the awful banality of witnessing an over-the-phone street scene breakup. The two things occupy the same space at the same time.

*DANCE/FIELD was formerly called ‘FIELD.’ The name was retroactively changed when a new, then-in-development, light and space durational art piece being developed had the working title ‘FIELD.’ That piece is now titled ‘AFTER.’